Ellie Kincaid

Former postdoc who admitted to faking data pleads guilty to attempted forgery

A cancer researcher who admitted to faking data has pleaded guilty to attempted forgery in a case involving letters of recommendation he passed off as coming from his former supervisor.

Last year, Georgios Laliotis, a former postdoc at The Ohio State University, was charged with forgery for allegedly creating a fake email address with the name of his PI, Philip Tsichlis, and using it to send two letters of recommendation to prospective employers.

Laliotis was later indicted for identity fraud, forgery, and telecommunications fraud, and pleaded not guilty to each count.

An editor resigned in protest. Now, Wiley is firing him four months earlier than he planned to leave.

The publisher Wiley has fired the chief editor of the Journal of Biogeography after he resigned over conflicts with the company.

Michael Dawson, a professor at the University of California, Merced, submitted his resignation on June 21, tweeting that he made the decision “because journal management declined to explore productive solutions to a suite of challenges facing the journal.”

He also tweeted:

Science rescinds expression of concern issued last month

Science has rescinded an expression of concern it issued one month ago after the authors provided data that “addressed concerns about the integrity of the paper.”

The journal had published the expression of concern for the 2021 article “Light-induced mobile factors from shoots regulate rhizobium-triggered soybean root nodulation” after two separate readers contacted the editorial team about an issue in the paper, as we reported at the time. The expression of concern noted that “that data presented in Fig. 5 assessed GmNSP1 expression rather than GmNIN expression.”

The article has been cited 43 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The journal is publishing the newly submitted data as a correction, as well as an editor’s note explaining the removal of the expression of concern. The new notice states:

Exclusive: Public health journal says it will retract vaping paper for questions authors say were addressed in peer review

The journal BMC Public Health plans to retract an article that found smoking rates fell faster than expected in the US as use of e-cigarettes increased, Retraction Watch has learned.

The authors contend that they addressed the issues cited in the retraction notice during the peer review process and say they addressed them even more extensively when the journal said they intended to retract.

The paper, “Population-level counterfactual trend modelling to examine the relationship between smoking prevalence and e-cigarette use among US adults,” was published last October. The authors are all employees of Pinney Associates, a consulting firm that they disclosed “provide[s] consulting services on tobacco harm reduction on an exclusive basis to Juul Labs Inc.” The article also disclosed that Juul Labs funded the research and reviewed and provided comments on a draft manuscript.

Some journals, including several in the BMJ family and the American Journal of Public Health, will not publish research funded by the tobacco industry, which has led to at least one retraction. But the planned BMC Public Health retraction notice does not refer to that conflict of interest.

Exclusive: City of Hope cancer researcher goes to court to fight misconduct finding

An alumna of the lab of Carlo Croce, a high-profile cancer researcher at The Ohio State University with 14 retractions, has sued the institution over the results of its investigation that found she committed research misconduct.

Flavia Pichiorri is now a principal investigator with her own lab researching potential therapies for multiple myeloma at City of Hope – a cancer center that also owns Cancer Treatment Centers of America – in Duarte, Calif.

She worked at Ohio State from 2004-16, first as a postdoctoral researcher in Croce’s lab, then as a research scientist, and finally as an assistant professor of hematology. She has been a PI on grants that garnered millions of dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health since switching jobs.

Sage retracting three dozen articles for ‘compromised’ peer review

Sage Publishing is retracting 37 articles from an engineering journal after finding “indicators of third party involvement” in the peer review process.

The publisher’s investigation continues, and more papers may be retracted, a spokesperson for the company told Retraction Watch.

A single retraction notice lists the links of the 37 papers to be retracted from Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part E: Journal of Process Mechanical Engineering. The notice states:

Journal editors resign, strike in dispute with Wiley over ‘business model that maximises profit’

The editor in chief of a Wiley journal has resigned, saying the publisher recently has “seemed to emphasize cost-cutting and margins over good editorial practice.”

Most of the journal’s associate editors are in the midst of a work stoppage protesting the same issues. After Wiley responded to the associate editors in a way they found “troubling,” the editors replied with a list of 12 demands, and a deputy editor in chief tendered her resignation.

Editorial boards of at least three other journals have recently resigned en masse, or threatened to resign, amid similar disputes.

Michael Dawson, editor in chief of the Journal of Biogeography, published a blog post announcing his resignation on June 21. In it, he wrote:

Journal asks scientist to step down from editorial board after sleuth’s comments linked him to paper mill

An engineering researcher has stepped down from an editorial board at the request of a journal’s leadership following a sleuth’s comment on a Retraction Watch post linking him to paper mill activity.

Masoud Afrand, an assistant professor of engineering at the Islamic Azad University in Iran, was, until recently, on the editorial board of the journal Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements. He also was listed on the website of Scientific Reports as a member of the journal’s editorial board in the subject of mechanical engineering.

He now has neither position. He has not responded to our requests for comment.

Journal to retract papers that cost its impact factor and spot in leading index

A journal that didn’t get an impact factor this year after Clarivate, the company behind the closely-watched but controversial metric, identified unusual citations in several articles will retract the offending papers, according to its editor.

Genetika, a publication of the Serbian Genetics Society, did not receive an updated impact factor in Clarivate’s 2023 Journal Citation Reports due to citation stacking, a practice in which authors or journals seem to trade citations, also known as “citation cartels” or “citation rings.”

Specifically, Clarivate identified five papers published in Genetika in 2021 that had been cited by 22 papers published in the journal Bioscience Research in 2022, Snezana Mladenovic Drinic, the editor of Genetika, told Retraction Watch. Clarivate also suppressed Bioscience Research this year, meaning that the journal did not receive a new impact factor either.

University finds former lecturer with two retractions plagiarized in seven publications

A former lecturer in the modern languages department of the University of St Andrews in Scotland committed plagiarism in seven papers published between 2014 and 2022, according to the results of an institutional investigation.

The university posted a statement on its website about the outcome of the investigation that did not name the researcher, who Retraction Watch has learned is Ros Holmes.

Holmes has two retractions in our database, both for plagiarism.

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